V. by Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon is a brilliant writer. The writing is imaginative, vivid, sometimes very funny. But, as V. demonstrates, a brilliant writer can be a dreadful novelist. The book is long, disjointed, and in the end (or rather, starting close to the beginning) very tedious. I did force myself to read it to the end (sustaining myself along the way by taking breaks to read Proust and Sinclair Lewis, both far more interesting). Some people claim to love this book, and I assume they are sincere; perhaps I'm missing something. For me, however, even while recognizing the cleverness of the writing, the literary allusions (I probably missed some of those), and the striking descriptions and comparisons, the overall effect was to numb the mind. I found none of the characters interesting or sympathetic or easily distinguishable from one another, and I found no direction or purpose in the book, not even a discernible plot. A critic quoted on the dust jacket of the edition I got from the library describes the book as indulging in the "luxury of dreams dreamt for the dreaming," and it does have the character of a dream: vivid, weird, and almost immediately forgotten.